Walking with Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie trailer: even in a time before humans, it’s all about boys

The first time I saw this trailer, many months ago, which was the first time I’d heard of this film, my first thought was, Oh, cool! A big-screen 3D look at a truly ancient world? A truly alien world that was real? Awesome!

But almost instantly, I was smacked in the face with this:

He was the smallest in the herd. Trying to find his place in a great big world.

And I was all, Wait, what? He? He? Oh, and he is gonna get to be a hero, is he?!

*grrrrr*

(I swear to Christ, the voiceover narrator is overenunciating he and his just to be a jerk about it.)

Even in a land before time, a time before humans and all our fucked up ideas about whose stories are worth telling and whose aren’t, even this story is about a boy dinosaur. Who gets to be a hero. Will there be a girl dinosaur who is impressed with his derring-do and walks off into the Cretaceous sunset with him? I will bet you a million billion zillion dollars that there is.

Have you ever read the book “Raptor Red” by Robert Bakker? That would be an awesome female-centered dinosaur movie. (Hmm, according to wikipedia, Robert Halmi Sr. has optioned the rights for the movie with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.)

Beowulf

Boy, that sounds familiar. How old is this book? I may have read it.

Jonathan Roth

1995. Bakker was one of the consulting paleontologists for Jurassic Park.

I saw the trailer yesterday, and I just think the movie looks absolutely abysmal. genders issues or not. Ok, actually, the CG itself looks pretty good. But as soon as the dinos opened their mouths to speak they lost me. Plus, the story is clich on top of cliche on top of cliche. UGH.

Danielm80

Not only does the story look generic, but the character designs look generic. How do they ever expect to sell action figures and stuffed animals?

It wasn’t the lack of female lead characters that first struck me about family films. We all know that’s been the case for ages, and we love when movies like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen hit it big. It was the dearth of female characters in the worlds of the stories — the fact that the fictitious villages and jungles and kingdoms and interplanetary civilizations were nearly bereft of female population — that hit me over the head. This being the case, we are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space. Couldn’t it be that the percentage of women in leadership positions in many areas of society — Congress, law partners, Fortune 500 board members, military officers, tenured professors and many more — stall out at around 17 percent because that’s the ratio we’ve come to see as the norm?

It doesn’t bother me that Walking with Dinosaurs is a story about a boy. Boys are pretty interesting, whether they’re dinosaurs or not. I just hope that his world includes some interesting girls, too, in spite of the trailer. Geena Davis has some ideas about that, as it happens:

OK, now for the fun part: It’s easy, fast and fun to add female characters, in two simple steps. And I want to be clear I’m not talking about creating more movies with a female lead. If you do, God bless and thank you. Please consider me for that role.

Step 1: Go through the projects you’re already working on and change a bunch of the characters’ first names to women’s names. With one stroke you’ve created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they’ve had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?

Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.

And there you have it. You have just quickly and easily boosted the
female presence in your project without changing a line of dialogue.

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